I’m playing post-rock really loudly on my speakers right now, shortly after waking up, and thinking about why the genre means so much to me. It’s probable that I’ve already written my thoughts down on this before but, at this point (five years into my career with the blog), I’ve…

In the past few years, it seems as if mainstream music media has started to ask the question “what the hell is post-metal?”. It gets the answer wrong a lot but we won’t hold it against them; to be honest, post-metal is really hard to pin down because it involves…

There’s a lot happening in the music world, and we here at Heavy Blog try our very best to keep up with it! Like the vast majority of heavy music fans, our tastes are incredibly vast, with our 3X3s in each Playlist Update typically covering numerous genres and sometimes a…

Even in a genre built on intentionally difficult aesthetics, metal vocals hold a special place of distinction for their divisiveness. Cleans aside, the world of growls, screams, gutturals, shrieks, and pig squeals is no country for the faint of heart and even the most trve, blve, cvlt, dyed-in-the-wool metal devotees…

Djent had an explosive entrance into the world of heavy music, around the start of the decade. It was a truly exciting occurrence, with first-wave acts like Periphery, Animals As Leaders and Cloudkicker filtering the technically-driven progressive sound of acts like Meshuggah, Sikth, and those of the budding “Sumeriancore” movement, into something altogether more accessible, while still retaining much of their forebears’ technical and progressive edge. Yet, like most new sub-genres, djent quickly devolved into pastiche and gave way to over saturation—perhaps a little bit quicker than most. Djent, it seems, has had a propperly ballistic trajectory, and—in 2017—as its momentum trails off, it’s hard to get excited about this once-promising phenomenon.

Last year, my interest was piqued by a surprise release from Woodsplitter, an instrumental solo project from Ben McLeod, guitar player of one of my favorite “new” bands, Nashville’s All Them Witches. Inflamed examines metal guitar through a variety of lenses: post, prog, death, stoner, doom, and even krautrock; showcasing an impressive variety and a refined level of comfort as each track seems to pare down to the core of what makes these sounds appeal to so many. His newest venture, Egyptian Overload explores an even wider swath of sounds and textures, plus the addition of saxophone. I asked Ben a few questions about the project, the rawness of his latest record, and future plans.

Inbox finds are the best; 75% of these posts were spawned from albums that we just randomly received. However, they’re usually submissions that do one thing really well or that don’t have enough runtime for a full review. Neither of those is the case here; I just love this album so much by now (after hearing it nonstop for three days) that I simply couldn’t wait for a review slot to open up. OK, let’s backtrack. A Great Adventure Or Nothing (named for the famous Hellen Keller quote) is a one man project from Canada. Nic Sauve, the man behind the music, produces this enchanting blend between post-rock, djent, progressive music and electronics. His debut, self titled release is nothing short of an achievement; it goes so many places and yet has its own identity. It’s really a wild ride, so let’s jump to the music and then meet back for some commentary.

Ken Sorceron has never been content with just sitting still. The Phoenix to Olympia transplant is the only remaining founding member of black metal act Abigail Williams, and is prolific in not just the USBM scene, but a prominent figure in underground and extreme music at large in recent years thanks to frequent collaboration with Finnish record label Blood Music as their go-to mastering engineer — with credits on releases from Emperor, Cloudkicker, and Perturbator alike — as well as serving time in acts such as Aborted and Lord Mantis.

Going over the twelve entries we’ve selected as the cream of the musical loner crop, it’s amazing to see not only the variety of genres present, but the fact that such enormous, impactful music can come from a single individual. From guitar porn to one man black metal to a whole slew of electronic subgenres, these artists prove that “strength in numbers” may not apply to everyone. Because while this crew may not have been the most social group on the playground, they spent their alone time producing some of our favorite music and proving that collaboration isn’t a necessity for quality tunes. So without further ado, sit back and reminisce with us over our favorite one person projects, or enjoy discovering what any one of these twelve musicians has to offer. And of course, feel free to comment with further suggestions of exceptional musicians who handily do it all.

Man, time flies, doesn’t it? I honestly could have sworn it had only been maybe 3 months since I wrote up this post about the excellent blog post-engineering’s first ever Bandcamp compilation. That mammoth endeavor included over 4 hours of brilliant music covering a very wide variety of post-rock, post-metal, and other heavily post-influenced sounds. It introduced me to a ton of fantastic bands (one of which even wound up on my year-end list!). It’s in fact been half a year since that was released though, and now post-engineering is back with a brand new comp spanning a whopping 42 tracks over nearly five hours. And just like the last one, it’s 100% free!